SEO is no easy beast to wrangle. It requires months of meticulous work and long hours of research, and sometimes you don't know if you're even moving in the right direction. When there are so many things you can do and not enough time in a day, sometimes it helps to focus on one thing at a time. In this case, we'll tell you all about link building and how it can help you better optimize your search engine results.
What is Link Building?
Link building is an essential aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) that involves having other websites link back to your own. These links serve as "votes" of credibility and trust, indicating to search engines that your website is a valuable and authoritative source of information. Effective link building requires developing relationships with other websites and creating high-quality, informative content that others will want to link to and share.
How Do I Get Reputable Sites to Link Back to My Own?
There are a few effective link-building strategies that home inspectors can take advantage of:
1. Write Guest Blog Posts
Offer to write high-quality guest blog posts for other websites in neighboring industries (real estate, pest control, etc) In return, ask them to post a link back to your website. They get good content for their own site, and you get more traffic to yours.
2. Find Online Directories
List your website on directory websites such as Angie's List or Yellow Pages. Even if you don't directly get leads from these places, Google's bots will see it and use it to raise their assessments of your reputation.
3. Get Recommended
Some home inspectors like to share a list of recommended contractors, but did you know it could work both ways? Look for websites in your area that have a 'Resources' or 'Recommended Companies' page and ask if they can list your company there. You can sweeten the deal by offering to return the favor.
4. Get Social
Take advantage of social media. Make a company page, write compelling posts, and include links back to your website. The more people who share it, the better, and social media makes it easy to repost.
Is There an Easier Way?
Many people believe that by using spammy behavior and manipulative links, they can trick search engines into giving them higher scores. This is strongly discouraged! Most major search engines catch onto this pretty quickly, and can even penalize you if they catch it.
Focus instead on high-quality, straightforward, and informative content, and your search engine rankings will thank you.
Spectora builds high-quality home inspection websites with out-of-the-box SEO setup.
